Tomorrow Never Learns
by Kfhlhckvifkbduvl
Summary: Book 5...ish. Will crosscut between immediately post-finale and a post appocolyptic future where spirits are insane, cities walk on legs, ghosts roam the night and everyone can bend, whether they like it or not. Will eventually include EVERYONE and explain how the world went to shit. Mystery , supernatural, horror, action and grandiose fantasy with a healthy dollop of romance/humor


_**Graveyard Queen**_

The dream has visited Nyra every night for a month. She knows it's the same dream, because it always wakes her in the exact same way; with an overwhelming _wrongness_ broiling in her gut, heart pounding out of her chest. But she can never remember what it's about. A blur of colour, sounds and smells that make her nostalgic for a time she's never known. Eventually, after her heart has calmed and the fear has loosened its jaws around her throat, she's left with nothing but this bone-deep sense of emptiness.

It's the first time in years she's let herself feel truly alone.

Her bedroom groans sympathetically, listing slightly in the morning breeze. The wind chimes outside rattle like dry bones. For a moment she just lies in bed, unmoving. The predawn light filters through the dirt-encrusted window, illuminating the faded Nucktuck posters plastering the curve of the walls, and the heaps of Old World relics haloing the heavy-duty porthole in the floor. The cable tethering the ancient air balloon to the ground a hundred storeys below cracks like a whip, and Nyra takes it as a call to action.

She swings her legs off the bed and lets them dangle for a second, before braving the icy metal floor to grab her cloak, goggles and boots. The boots are a new find, thick and sturdy with shiny metal clasps. Papi always used to say that your feet were the most important weapon you had, and to protect them above all else.

"If you're not a runner you'll end up a Walker." he'd used to chuckle, one too many times for Marcus' taste. He'd warned them making jokes about those who Walked was a sure way to join them, but Nyra had laughed anyway. She supposes Marcus must be dead by now, too.

She tries not to think about it.

Now dressed, she levers the porthole open and lowers herself into the open air. The wind is strong, snatching at her clothes and hair with greedy hands. She runs a hand over the tethering cable, taking a moment to adjust to its gentle sway. From this height the city looks like so many dollhouses.

She lets go and gravity takes hold.

For three seconds, everything is white noise. For three seconds, Nyra keeps her eyes shut tight and lets the wind try to strip the flesh from her face.

Then her eyes snap open and her arms come round; she feels the familiar tug in her gut and something flows from the pit of her stomach to the tips of her fingers; there's a soft _woosh_ and Nyra shoots back up like a bullet fired from a gun. The wind screeches in frustration, clawing uselessly after her.

Nyra swirls her hands around a bit, trying to find that perfect little sweet spot, and feels a cushion of air form beneath her feet. This time her descent is slow and controlled, giving her time to enjoy the view.

The sun is just emerging over the peaks of the broken skyscrapers, painting everything molten gold. From here, the crater where downtown used to be looks almost beautiful, the rusted out hulks of abandoned Satomobiles littering the roads like cracked sea shells. Far in the distance, Harmony Tower pierces clouds tainted pink and green by dancing spirits, like a rusted needle.

Just at the last second she loses it and her cushion deflates; Nyra drops the last six feet to the roof below, the impact driving the breath from her body. Papi had always shaken his head and scolded her whenever she took the leap, and ask her what was so offensive about grapnel lines and harnesses. But Papi had been a fire user, and he could never understand the freedom of the wind as she did, the way it could inflate inside like a balloon and have you floating off the ground where nothing can touch you. Falling makes her feel alive; it kindles a flame inside so fierce and bright not even Papi could hope to match it.

The dream is nothing but an echo, snatched away by the wind.

She wafts across the roof, fingers still tingling and a small smile gracing her lips, and shimmies down the twisted fire escape jutting out of the wall like a some hideous, rust-and-iron tumor. She swings into the building with a fancy little flip it's taken three weeks to get right, and she's just about to ask the others if they want to come scavenging today when she remembers they're all dead.

The fire inside collapses in on itself and is drowned by ash and smoke and black, like a fantastic candle burning too hot. Reality takes her smile, folds it up into nothingness and tucks it away where she won't find it again.

They're waiting for her, the bodies slumped over at the table like some grotesque, mad hatter's tea party. Kyro is moulting now; the feathers piling beneath his chair like drifts of autumn leaves. His neck lolls like a marionette with its strings cut, a beak jutting from the place where his mouth used to be like a shard of broken bone.

Shu Ten is violent in death. The fungus is still spreading; his skin bubbles and swells and bursts like an overripe fruit. It had claimed his head long ago, and whenever Nyra can pluck up the courage to look him in the face, she fancies it looks like the open maw of some giant crab; all ridges like mandibles and glistening, peach-pink folds.

Nyra skirts around the edge of the room, the way one skirts around the edge of a mausoleum once the moon has set. The dream always manages to open her up and take out all the most private, dangerous things. Papi's face flashes before her eyes again and she wrestles him into the same box the smile had gone into.

Focus.

She makes it to the storage room without breaking into a run. She supposes she ought to move the bodies at some point, but honestly, she doesn't know how spirit possession it contagious? Any spirits, both the possesors and the men's own, had fled the empty husks at the table long ago, in that mad, gibbering rush of the newly christened dead, but Nyra still didn't trust them not to leap out and grab her, to pull her down to join them -

Focus.

The storage room has only three walls; the one opening to the street is nothing but rubble, piled into a four-foot barricade shielding the building. More wind chimes rattle and whisper like snakeskin over sand. From here, it's a straight shot to the downtown crater. Out of the corner of her eye, Nyra can see the sliver of green through the buildings. As she watches it seems to grow somehow, drinking in all the light and becoming thicker and darker.

She grabs the essentials (food, water, toolkiit, first aid supplies) already waiting for her by the barricades. Trying not to think about things.

The annoying thing is she doesn't even know exactly what those _things_ are. All she knows is there's this funny blockage in her chest that's pushing everything dangerous up and forcing everything else down and holding it there, where the pressure grew and grew and grew, like a champagne bottle being shaken until everything is frozen at that moment before the cork explodes.

Nyra realises she hasn't moved; her hand hovers over the last piece of kit. He breather and mask, only used for going one place, a mandatory saftey precaution for the entire group. Not that they'd done anyone much good. Hers was the last one left; the others had been claimed by the crater, along with their owners. Those that had made it back, barely, dragging themselves along like they were nothing but broken glass inside, were soon to be consumed by the possession-infection racing up their bodies like wildfire.

She looks out to the crater, and the blockage in her chest does a funny little forwards rolling motion, like ripples lapping at the sea shore, running their fingers softly through the sand and dragging it back. Her hand doesn't move.

Everbody makes it to the crater at some point. It seems inevitable.

The ripples grow to tidal waves, pounding against the shore, carving out great chunks and washing them away. The pressure in her chest grows and morphs and suddenly it has a name. Hunger. She is hungry, she is ranvenous, she needs something, and she knows without a shadow of a doubt it lies in wait for her at the bottom of the crater.

Something wild pounds in her ears. Her hand closes around the mask -

A Walker, nothing more than a shadow of smoke in the rising sunlight, drifts around the corner. Nyra snatches her hand away as if burned, backs up to the doorway. The roaring has vanished, the pressure was never there. She stares through the Walker, and it through her, nothing but a streak of blue and grey that fades to nothing even as she watches.

One, two, three full minutes pass, and it doesn't come back. She lets herself breathe. She grabs her stuff and vaults the barricade into the city beyond. The mask lies discarded and forgotten on the floor.

The street is cold and hard and broken, like everything else. Weeds force themselves through the cracks, green fingertips prising them wider, great gashes of green scarring the asphalt. Her footsteps echo off the shafts of concrete that used to be buildings, lining the road. In the sky the dancing spirits meet the invading sunlight, and their battle colours the morning the putrid greens and purples of half-set bruises.

The buildings cast shadows, deep pools of black that she takes a wide, weaving path to avoid. Never trust the shadows, even at high noon. That's Walker domain, and wandering in is just asking to be Touched. Even now she can see a few glimmering in the farthest corners; faint wisps of evervescent blue that could kill you in a heartbeat.

They line the sidewalk, like soldiers at a passing out parade, and though she watches them retreat in the wake of the encroaching sunrise, there's still a sick feeling in Nyra's stomach and a little warning ticking over in her head, that tells her; _too long_. Walkers are night creatures, and when she was a baby they would fade long before the first rays even touched the horizon. Marcus used to use them as a way of telling when day was about to break. Marcus was -

Focus.

Now the Walkers linger until the last second, some even still strong enough to move, like the one at the barricade...

Nyra passes a bookstore with its windows blown out, the wares flapping along the pavement in the morning breeze, like birds with broken wings, still trying to fly. She has a few books back home, stacked under her bed in her balloon, next to her unseen mover collection. They haven't come out in a while. Shu Ten was teaching her to read, something he'd learnt from his father, but now Shu was -

 _Focus._

Nyra comes to her greengrocers, with its ripped-up floor and torn-away roof, a victim of the same day that had carved up downtown. But it wasn't all bad: the mix of exposed earth, pulped produce and a dash of rainwater let in by the hole in the roof had produced a small miracle. She'd found the infant orchard about a year back, nothing but a stunted moon-peach tree, some pea plants and a lone potato. She'd adopted the place; tilling the earth, watering the plants properly, replanting the fruit when it came.

Her feet carry her over the threshold on their own. She kneels by her little tree. It's taken more sweat and tears than it really deserves, this runty thing. Papi always told her -

 _ **Focus.**_

Nyra busies her hands with the watering can collecting rainwater in the back corner. It's only half full, not a good sign. Winter was hard enough on the garden, with ravaging frosts that had killed her potatoes dead. She remembers scrabbling through the dirt, desperate fingers probing for signs of life.

Nyra brings the watering can back over to the tree, and darkens the earth between its roots with a light sprinkling that soon becomes a heavy downpour. She doesn't think to save some until the last drop is spent. Something vague and half-formed in the back of her head tells her that was stupid. She has to drink, the peas have to drink, she doesn't know when it will rain next...

She can't really bring herself to care about the peas. Nyra has never much liked them anyway, and the peach tree has always been more important. Kyro used to tell her stories about the taste of a fresh moon peach, and she'd daydreamed entire hours away fantasising about the feel of the skin breaking on her tongue. She'd earned the reality the hard way, whipping the tree into shape whether it liked it or not, refusing anything but the fattest, juciest fruit possible.

Marcus had cursed the tree to oblivion a thousand times over for the way it ate up her time, the way it cut into her scavenging. Once she'd fallen asleep curled in its boughs, woken only when dusk was falling and the Walkers were begining to prowl, and the others had come to check she wasn't dead. They'd almost torn the tree up by the roots then and there for distracting her, but Nyra had thrown herself in front and declared the axe would have to go through her first.

They'd yanked her away, muttering the air blue, but sure enough, a few months later her tree had been bowed over with fruit.

The second harvest had only been a few weeks ago; she's actually brought a peach with her today, and she fishes it out as she settles in the boughs of her tree, watching the new sunlight dapple her orchard green and gold, thinking. Her foot swings lazily back and forth, boot tip just skimming the damp earth. It's funny, but now that she thinks about it, Nyra supposes everything in the city is technically hers, with no one else here to claim it. She is the Queen of Republic City.

The thought brings another smile to her lips, and she finishes the moon peach thinking up all the awesome decrees she's going to pass as Queen, like the Earth monarchs of old. Then she packs up and heads back out onto the street, rubbing the tree trunk one last time for luck.

The terrain gets easier as the cracks in the roads get less jagged; Nyra figures out here the shockwaves must have been relatively mellow. The buildings morph from functional, pretty resedentials to squat, ugly warehouses, and pretty soon she's reached her destination.

The sign by the gate is so faded its barely legible, but Nyra can just make out:

 _ **FU**_ _ **TU**_ _ **RE IN**_ _ **D**_ _ **USTR**_ _ **IE**_ _ **S**_

 _ **ST**_ _ **O**_ _ **RAGE**_ _ **F**_ _ **AC**_ _ **I**_ _ **LITY**_

 _ **\- PRIVA**_ _ **T**_ _ **E P**_ _ **R**_ _ **OP**_ _ **E**_ _ **RTY -**_

She supposes it's some kind of warning, but now all the chain-link fence protects is mountains of scrap, rusting into nothing. The place is paradise for scavengers. Junk blankets everything; motors, engines, piping, cables, all glittering in the sun, the treasure of a thousand troves.

Nyra takes a breath, and releases, pushing her arms down. The tug in her gut is sharp this time, and a rush of air erupts fron her palms; she rockets over the fence with _way_ too much force and crashes headfirst into a landslide of nuts and bolts.

Not her best landing.

She picks herself up, brushes off and trudges up the first slope. The view from the summit is priceless; acres of metal and rust stretching in every direction, teetering stacks of Satomobile chasis and, in the distance, a strange, stretched out metal box with broken windows, a door warped shut and huge magnetic strips on the bottom, keeled over onto its side like a dying gemsbok-bull.

Far, far off to the horizon she can just make out a pack of silver grey specks, swarming over the green plains beyond the city limits like mechanical locusts. Nyra shudders. She's been up close and personal with a Machine maybe three times in her entire life. Get too close and you're dead meat.

Luckily something about the city (or more specifically, Nyra suspects, the crater) drives their circuits haywire, so they won't get too close.

Probably. Almost definitely.

Nyra starts picking her way through the hills and valleys of junk towards the big metal box, eyes sifting through the metal at her feet, ocassionally pausing to dig a screw from the folds of her cloak with a mumbled curse. Damn scrap gets everywhere; she takes so much of it home that pretty soon she'll have enough to start her own mountain.

Today is a good day; she finds wiring to replace the stuff that blew out the heater last week, enough sturdy plate to reinforce the ground floor windows, and there's a perfect specimen of a radiator fan that will do very nicely for her new AC system. The best thing, though, is a battered little case she finds hiding under an old boiler. She has to scrabble and stretch to get at it, but containers are always a good sign; there's no point protecting something if it isn't valuable. A few delicate twists with her bobby pin later and Nyra can hardly believe what she's looking at.

Lenses. Projector lenses. As in, Mover projectors. Suddenly its all she can do to not run home hell for leather, squealing like a baby. _Finally._ She's been looking for she doesn't even _know_ how long, years, _ages_ , ever since she found her projector. Her mind is a whirlwind of Nucktuck posters, of cackling villains and exotic locales and thrilling adventure...

She practically dances the rest of the way. She even tries to sing; her voice bounces off the mountains, grating and scraping like metal over metal, but Nyra is beyond caring. She bounds up onto the big metal box. Yes, she is a Queen. A Queen with a kingdom and a throne and now a life of rousing adventure, with a hero to fight for her in the valliant Nucktuck...

Lunch passes in a haze of sunshine and daydreams. As soon as she gets home she's going to fix the projector up and finally, _finally_ get away from the city. Visiting The Water Tribes and the United Republic, all from her little air ballooon -

Something moves.

Nyra is a statue, fear churning molten in her gut. For a second everything is frozen still. Then something rustles just out of sight, like the shallow breathing of the soon to be dead. Very, _very_ slowly, Nyra gets to her feet, craning her neck over a collapsed stack of Satomobiles.

A body lies facedown in the dirt, only twenty feet away. She jerks her head down, as if looking at it any longer than she has to might cause physical harm. A silent, five second war wages in her head. Then, she slides off of the metal box and creeps very, _very_ slowly around the debris. She has something raised above her head, ready to throw at the first sign of agression. It's only much later that she realises it's a peach.

The thing on the floor a man. Relatively speaking. At least, it looks male. From this distance she can see the deep furrow in the dust where he's dragged himself forward, like the trail a snail leaves behind as it oozes along. And he _is_ oozing something. Blood?

She takes another two, tentative steps forward, as if scared the ground will crumble beneath her feet. The man on the floor freezes; senses her presence. He looks up at her, opens his mout to speak, relief splashed all over his face. She is his saviour.

And then Nyra is running back as fast as her legs can carry her, as far away as they can get her from that _thing_ that looked up at her with so much hope. Because that thing is not a man. The man inside him is being eaten away even as she flees, consumed by the moss coating every inch of exposed skin.

Nyra runs, but _its_ face still burns before her eyes. Colourless hair, only faint wisps of it left. Cracked, pink mouth, tinged with green as the moss turned its conquest inwards. Eyes burning with electric fire, a thousand different colours all at once.

She's seen those eyes before. Twice before.

The path back is a blur; next thing she knows, Nyra is stumbling past them, the two pitched over at the table. She wonders dazedly how long the thing in the junkyard has until it's left cold and lifeless too, and suddenly that's it and the floodgates open and the tears are pouring down her cheeks.

She weeps for the man being devoured by some mindless spirit from the inside out.

The porthole slams and Nyra realises she's made it back to her balloon, somehow. Her cloak gets caught as she tries to yank it off, and for a split second she goes mad because the thing on the floor is coming for her and she can't see and it's going to grab her and never let go and she can't _breathe_ , she's going to end up like Kyro and Shu Ten and then there will be no one left-

The cloak tears and she hurls it free, gasping. A cascade of screws and bolts spill from its folds and she kicks them away like cockroaches. Then she leaps onto her bed in a gust of wind and huddles into a ball in the centre, shivering.

A Queen lording over her kingdom.

After a time she realises the possessed man is not coming for her, and her body unwinds like a rusted spring. She needs something to keep her hands busy and fill the gaping silence, so she retrives her projector from the corner and the new lenses from her bag, and painstakingly reassembles her gateway to another world, sitting cross-legged on her bed.

She's delicate and painstaking, like an archeologist handling fine china. She's still convinced the projector will disintergrate in her hands, but somehow it survives her touch. Her hands are shaking as shet sets it on the tripod, runs the cable to the electrical socket in the wall; she needs this so badly. Her hand flails around under the bed and skims a leather-bound book. Nyra flinches so hard her elbow slams painfully into the bed frame, but it's OK now because she has the Mover tapes in her hands. Nucktuck will save her.

Which adventure first? _The Machinations of the Monstorous Ice Monster_? _The Danger of the Deadly Drill_? _The Malevolent Maze of Malice_? Her eye drifts to another tape, unmarked. Maybe... Her hand hovers for a second, then down, caught in a magnetic pull. Yes. She loads the tape with a satisfying click, and settles back on the bed as it starts up its mystical whir. She doesn't know why, but suddenly watching this tape has become the most calming thing in the world. Maybe it's another Nucktuck, and matches up with one of her posters. _The Extremely Evil Extinction_...?

Images begin to flicker across the wall, soundless, bright and dark and faded at the same time, like smoke caught in sunlight.

It's not _The Extremely Evil Extinction_.

 _The camera opens facing the city from just beyond the bay, high in the air. It takes a second for Nyra to register it must be the same city, her city, because in the Mover its still standing, proud and gleaming. The picture changes; a raised road wraping around a massive tree and snaking out of sight; she realises the wierd little things trundling along it must be Satomobiles, and then she wants to rewind the film so she can take that in properly, because it looks so wrong when they move... The picture changes again, twice in quick succession. Nyra blinks and rubs her eyes in disbelief. That's the island out in the bay, but... were those balls of fluff flying? But then the image is gone and they've cut to - that cannot be the park. Where were all the craters, all the vines? There's another shot of the city, and Nyra really needs to stop now because this much clean is making her nauseous. But then the next image wipes her out completely. People. Walking around. With spirits. Not two feet from their faces. The Mover leaves her with a final shot of an old man, the only person on the tape in normal clothes, cuddled up with at least six of them. He winks and grins at the camera, like they're all sharing some enormous joke._

Nyra leaps from her bed and batters the wall, screaming and shouting. She doesn't care that the tape has spooled out, she doesn't care the people on it can't hear her. She needs to get to them, she needs to reach through and shake these suicidal idiots in their ridiculous clothes and stupid hats. What are they thinking? Getting that close! They're all going to die!

Eventually she realises they're all dead anyway, and because they're all dead she's all alone and no-one is going to hear her yelling. So instead she crouches by the projector and rewinds the film, frame by frame, tracking the movement of the scurrying little ant vehichles and the floating horned things as they stop and start across the sky.

Once all the anger and shock has burned away, Nyra finds an odd sense of contentment, looking through this window to another time. And layered beneath that, something deeper. She finds herself returning to two images in particular. One is looking down on the island in the bay. She can see buildings and a big indented octagon in the floor, and what looks like a set of poles at the back? There are also exactly four people in funny looking unifoms riding one of the funny looking flying things. It's utterly wierd. What's even wierder is that when she looks at this scene, she feels more at home than she has since Papi. Even more than with her garden.

The other image is of a statue in the park. It's of a girl about Shu Ten's age, proud and strong, with three ponytails. And when Nyra looks at the statue's face she could swear she's making eye contact. With a picture, of a statue that's definately rubble by now. Who is she?

Nyra realises what the deeper thing is, layered underneath the contentment. Longing. It's almost like the hunger she felt this morning, but that was hard and raw and painful in her chest. This stuff sits in her stomach, warm and simmering gently like homemade broth. It's the same feeling the dream gives her, except without the horrible, hollow aftertaste because she has something tangible to pair it with now.

And speak of the devil, right at that moment Nyra begins to fall asleep. She isn't tired; it's still just gone midday, but sleep still pulls at her like quicksand, thick and heavy. She considers panicking, but decides it would be pointless. She's had enough blind panic for one day, and who would come to help her? She's up to her chin now anyway, and her eyelids are leaden. Her last thought is of the man dragging his slow way through the dirt, and how long he has left before he joins the ghosts on the tape in their perfect fantasy world.

...

 _Nyra looks down, and is mildly surprised to see she has no body. Or eyes. So maybe 'look down' is the wrong word. Rather, she turns and looks at herself, and herself just happens to be a ball of ephemeral light and gold, that pulses in time with a heartbeat she can feel but does not have._

 _She pulls her gaze away, and turns. In the distance, three pinpricks of burning fight against the dark. One is faded and dull, another wavers as if caught halfway through the veil, reluctant to enter. The third blazes irratically, trying to dance to three different rhythms at the same time._

 _A voice welcomes her, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, reverberating deep inside. The voice is old beyond old, yet it brims with tireless energy. Nyra has the impression of blue. Not sharp and icy, like Walker blue, but warm and comforting; the colour at the heart of a candle flame. Nyra feels herself smile in her sleep. This must be what having a mother is like._

 _..._

When her eyes slide back open, it's dusk, and Nyra knows what she has to do. The feeling in her chest is back again; waves rushing through her viens. This time she surrenders to it, letting the current carry her forwards.

She packs quickly and quietly, swan dives through the hatch, and is pounding the streets in five minutes flat. She's not used to being on ground level this late, and the neon glow of the dancing spiritlight transforms her city into an alien world.

This is suicide; the ground is already thick with spectral mist. Walkers are coming. Faint blue glows flicker at the edge of her vision; down alleyways, from windows high in the air. They shift and pulse as she passes, like dust motes caught in her wake, drifting after her. By the time she's reached the warehouses, they're uncomfortably bright, like naked lightbulbs. The rational part of her brain screams; _not enough time, not enough..._

Nyra vaults the chain-link fence in a single bound, ignoring it. The Satomobiles lie in wait like crouching predators. Her footsteps are too loud; she keeps tripping on things that hide in the writhing shadows. She finds the big metal box again and hoists herself up to get a better view -

She slams herself back down, tasting blood as she bites her tongue.

The man isn't there any more. He's been replaced by something worse. So. Much. Worse.

The pack of Machines she'd seen earlier? The ones who probably, almost definitely were going to stay way, way off in the distance? Yeah, they hadn't done that.

There are two of them, that she can see, prowling around the clearing, muzzles to the ground. The spiritlight glints and glides over their bodies, tinting the liquid silver rose. They're huge, bigger than any she's seen before, with canine snouts and six thick, piston like legs. One kicks an oil drum, and it flies twenty feet before slamming into Nyra's box. She squeaks like a frightened mouse and thanks every god she knows that the bang covers it up.

She needs to know where the man has gone

 _They've eaten him, they've eaten him, they've..._

She raises her head as high as she dares, and makes out the furrow he's left in the dirt. It snakes away to the left, weaving and juddering like a drunken thing. Her eyes pull at it like string, curving around that stack of Satomobiles on the far right -

One of the machines twists, rubber not steel. Nyra gets her head down in time ( _pleaseplasespleaseplease_ ), but not before she looks into the eyes of a creature who lives another life, a non-life, untouched by anything except the cold midnight glow that lights it from within.

It sniffs. There's an electrical tinge to it, around the edges, but the man's definitely not been eaten, so Nyra focuses on that. She needs to get over there, preferably without getting eaten herself.

The machine takes a step forward.

Nyra slides backward onto the floor. The soft thump in the dust is a crescendo.

Two steps.

She forces herself to turn her back on the machines, though thier gaze prickles against her back, the solid metal between them making no difference. Nyra breathes deep, takes the air to her gut, brings her arms in, exhales, thrusts forward.

Nothing.

Panic plays a high, discordant tune with her insides. She pushes it down.

Three steps.

She breathes deep, _deeper_. Feels the rush and swell in her lungs. Brings her arms in. Exhales. Thrusts _forward._

The hook behind her navel jerks and pulls a whole stack of Satomobiles with it, a full fifty metres away, in a mass of wind and tumbling rust. Behind her the machines pounce forward, and Nyra throws herself backwards, through a broken window with no time to spare.

Claws scrape as the roof buckles under their weight, then the whole world tips as they push off and away to investigate the possibilty of prey. Nyra lies with broken glass glittering in her hair like a royal's diamonds. The machines fade to the backround.

She scurries out and around the box like a quick little mouse, following the dust trail across the clearing and round the Satomobile stack.

The furrow winds only a few more metres, bottoming out at the foot of a cog-and-screw avalanche. Nyra throws herself forward, scooping the debris away like a prospector searching for gold, too scared to bother about quiet. She refuses to think about how close the man was to being mincemeat.

Her gold is forest green and slimy and wrist shaped; she grabs and pulls with all her might. He slops out like an unborn feotus, an unready ball of limp limbs. Nyra grabs his shoulders and heaves upward, trying to balance him on legs with the strength of matchsticks.

They stagger a few feet. He collapses like a house of cards. Nyra bites her cheek to keep from screaming. Time is candle burning at both ends, and this idiot can't even be bothered to -

Across the yard, too close, metal screams as it's ribboned by razor claws.

Nyra drops to her knees and shakes his shoulders.

"Please, you have to walk now. You have to get up now."

Footfalls draw closer, beats of a funeral drum.

She grabs his face, forces herself to look into his eyes, Shu Ten's eyes, Kyro's eyes. The colour fades in and out, rainbows washed out by too much rain.

"I need you to get up."

Something stirs, long lost in the dark corridors of his mind. Something human. She takes it, and his arm, and this time they're hobbling along.

One step, two steps, come on come on come on -

A growl skating the edge of mechanical and monstorous rips the breath from her lungs. Piston-legs punch the earth. The shadow of death passes overhead, and a machine materialises in front.

Nyra's feet stutter to a stop.

Its muzzle opens. A needle, silky delicate and sugar pink in the spirit light, slides forth like a hornet's sting.

Nyra's feet slide apart, lowering her centre of gravity as if to meet the machine mid-pounce. She can do this. Probably. She did get bloody nose last time. But it'll work now. Because it has to.

"Hold on." she tells her senseless passenger.

And then she _is_ the wind, bellowing its approval in her ears. Her feet touch the space above the ground and the world on either side becomes a streaky pallette of brown and pink. She _is_ the hornet, darting between piston legs and then free, leaving the machines behind with huge, leaping strides.

Faster, faster; she has brought the eagle on the wind and the hawk in the noonday sun here, to the witching hours of night.

She glances to the side and sees them as jagged silver daggers in her peripheral, and laughs, because poor things, didn't they know a funeral drum could never keep up with a heartbeat?

She sweeps an arm across the world, the gale rises, and a toppling stack of Satomobiles smash her predators to nothing but more scrap amongst mountains of scrap.

Nyra keeps running.

The fence comes into sight, and it's like her whole body exhales. All the energy abandons her and Nyra staggers to a stop. The moss man hits the floor like a sack of cement.

She bends over, catching her breath. It worked. First time for everything.

Not done yet.

She pulls the man to his feet again, draping his arm over her shoulders, and starts out onto the street.

The Walkers are waiting on the road ahead, luminescent jellyfish drifting through the deep. Nyra forces herself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. She draws closer, feeling a gentle tugging at the edges of her mind. Walkers do this, when night is at the zenith of power. They make you feel what they felt, in the moments before they died.

Nyra is amongst them now, and fear prickles down her spine like icy water. They don't notice her. Not yet. She keeps her eyes trained ahead, not looking at the faces, like photos from a mortuary's ledger, trying to let their sadness and regrets and longings wash over her. Her body needs her to run. The man wouldn't make it. She keeps walking.

A Walker in front veers suddenly, and she jumps too hard, avoiding it by a hair's breadth, and has to snatch her elbow in before it brushes the one behind-

Her heart hammers. She's surrounded by bodies, but hers is the only one beating. This silence is for dead things. She should not be here.

Another Walker halts just ahead, and Nyra is forced to stop. Her bones have turned to jelly. The Walker turns, slowly. She is forced to look it in the eye, and something streams from it to her across the silence. She feels its frantic heartbeat, the hard explosion of its breath and the final tidal wave of light that had stripped him of feeling-

He tilts his head and holds her gaze, his face so bright now it's almost solid, and she can pick out every detail. He was young, when he died. He wears the same clothes as the people from the videotape.

Beside her, the moss man groans.

It echoes. Suddenly every face is staring at her. Nyra's ears pop.

They sweep down on her like a funeral veil, and Nyra plunges forward, yanking the man along and cursing him with every name she knew. She dodges and spins and weaves through a minefield. Hands grasp for her. She's past the warehouses, the residentials usher her forward.

Her greengrocers comes into sight and she doesn't even think, she just runs for where she knows she'll be safe.

And stops.

Another Walker lies in ambush, under the broken roof. It hovers just in front of her tree, where she'd sat only hours before, a murderer with his knife poised over the crib.

For a second, the perversion of this robs Nyra of anything human.

Then she sees red, drops the man's hand and surges her arms forward. (Her tree, how dare they even _touch_ her tree). The Walker explodes like a sandcastle in a power fan. The particles freeze and float like ash on the breeze for a whole second, as if in disbelief.

Then it comes at her in a thick, suffocating curtain, reforming as it closes. Nyra stumbles back and has just enough time to see the silent fury on its face before she's seized the man's hand and runs again.

Her building is in sight. Breath comes in ragged gasps.

She leaps her barricade and dumps the moss man like a sack of potatoes, sending an air gust through the air chimes hanging over the entrance. They make a noise like a snake's rattler; the Walker chasing her shrieks and rebounds as if the noise were a solid wall.

Nyra watches it streak away. Blood pounds in her ears like a war drum.

Behind her, the moss man groans and keels over.

She's at his side in a flash, laying him flat on the ground. She knows what's happening. She's had experience.

Her splayed hands come down on his chest, hard.

 _Onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree..._

Your heart stops beating first, in spirit possession. The spirit shuts everything physical down until you're nothing but a jumble of thoughts and energy. Spirits don't have hearts, Nyra knows this. Mad and mindless as they are, spirits don't understand why humans even need hearts.

So, they just switch them off.

The man spasms, fist missing Nyra's face by a centimetre. She ignores it, keeps pressing down. She is not stopping. Not this time.

 _Breathebreathebreathebreathe..._

Shu Ten's infection had begun on his chest, a silent, sickly bright firework exploding over his heart. She'd felt it stall like a rusted engine and started pumping, like she was now, but then parts of him had started coming away in her hands like the layers of an onion.

 _Onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree..._

Tears had mixed with pus and she'd had to stop, for fear she'd pound right through Shu's chest, and she couldn't wipe her eyes because there were little bits of him stuck under her fingernails.

 _Breathebreathebreathebreathebreathe..._

The moss man's eyes are flickering like lightning bugs, trapped behind his lids. He's not groaning anymore. He just lies there and takes the thrusts, jerking like a ragdoll.

Come on.

Nyra grits her teeth and pushes harder, harder than she knows she should, but she also knows there are things worse than death in this world.

Something dark trickles from his mouth, but it's all wrong because he dosen't smell like blood, just mould and mildew and rotting from old rain. Somehow it's worse; she remembers to breathe and chokes, brushes a hair out of her face and something liquid that's definately not from her smears and mats, very much like that other thing she's trying very hard not to think about, because she will _not_ throw up...

COME ON.

 _Breathebreathebreathe-_

She feels a fluttering under her fingertips. Feeble and faltering, but it's there.

He gasps. Hacks. Spits. And lies still, but for the gentle rising and falling of his chest.

Nyra collapses backwards, all dripping sweat and shaking limbs. A smile sparks, flickering as a candle would. Then she looks at the man who's life she just saved, and the smile grows to a grin, and then she's laughing. It's high and cracked and just shy of crazy, but oh so _real_.

In time, she lapses back into quiet and they just lay there together, sharing the first moment of peace she can remeber in forever.

Then reality wraps its cold, clammy hands back around her neck.

Nyra's eye's slide open. Tendrils of spectral mist snake past her, lacing dlicately round and round her patient. She pushes herself up on her elbows, and turns her head to face what she already knows is there.

The Walkers watch in silence from just beyond the barricade, packed so tightly their outlines overlap, a hundred chalk figures all blurred together. Their combined luminesecence casts the illusion of daylight on the entire street, except daylight doesn't crackle and fizz like a lightning storm.

For a long time they stay frozen in that moment, the little girl and the assembled hoardes of the dead.

Then Nyra gets up off the floor, stretches, and sets to work. Fetching a damp cloth is the first order of business, and she settles by the moss man, dabbing at his forehead with measured, delicate strokes.

She can't bring herself to be scared. Fear is a distant, far off concept that belongs to this morning and a million years ago. It would return, no doubt, as she'd noticed the worst things in life tend to. But not now. A Queen must attend her subjects. This man was weaker and feebler than the pulse sustaining him, but he had come to her kingdom, and by Nucktuck, she would defend him.

The talking would come next. Having shut all the physical stuff down, the spirit sets its sights on your mind. Nyra figures it must be pretty lonesome, being stuck in a human body with nowhere to go, so the spirit finds your mind, and strikes up a conversation.

She remembers an image from her last trip downtown, a poster for some kind of useless toy. A house made of brightly painted building blocks, being picked apart by a curious toddler. That's what they do to you, from the inside out.

The first time, with Kyro and Shu Ten, Nyra had come down the morning after they'd come back with apprehension tugging her along on a noose. When she'd heard their voices, she'd almost tripped in her haste to run and embrace them and hear it was all going to be OK. Finally, finally.

But they were still slumped over at the table, where they'd stayed since she'd left them there, speech fitful as if fending off nightmares. It had dawned on her they weren't talking to each other at all. The relief had drained out through her boots, replaced by tears she saw no point in holding back. Sightless eyes had bored holes in the tablecloth, seeing nothing.

Nyra had meant to strengthen the barricades that day. Instead she'd ran for her garden, hoping to bury the nonsense words they screamed at tormentors she could not see in the soil.

She won't do that again. She will not leave this stranger she barely knows. It would be like abandoning a babe in its crib, he is so innocent and unspoiled. But even the thought of the others' shrieking, pouring everything they had into an argument that would never end, makes her shudder. She won't do that again, either.

So she fills the silence herself. Her words are small, slightly chipped from underuse and leave more empty space than she'd like, but she glues them together as best she can, and it's nice to talk to someone who isn't a plant. At least, not yet.

"My name is Nyra. But you can adress me as Your Majesty, if you'd like. Or not. I'm not very good at this Queen stuff, y'see. Not got much practice yet. But practice makes perfect. Papi always used to say that."

Nyra leans back and considers the man thoughtfully. He appears to have dozed off. His nose twitches slightly.

"You'd have liked my Papi, I think. At least, I'm going to pretend you would've liked him, because the people who didn't like Papi generally ended up trying to kill us, and I really don't want you to turn out to be that sort of person." The man snuffles, and his head lolls like the tongue of an overheated dog.

After some consideration, Nyra decides he's alright.

She keeps talking, keeps trying to hold the quiet at bay. The Walkers stand silent vigil, their electric firefly glow ebbing with the rhythm of her voice. They don't move to attack, though Nyra does keep half an eye on them. It doesn't matter anyway. Four feet of concrete is a sheet of tissue paper to a Walker.

She's never been so close to so many at once. There's a little voice snapping in her ear to run, to run until her legs gave out and escape those hollow eyes that look into her without really seeing. She muzzles it.

The Walkers wait.

The moss man starts talking, as inevitable as a funeral bell. It's not as bad as it could've been; Nyra can almost imagine they're having a proper conversation now, like the ones she'd had with Shu or Papi over the old tea set, when she was small enough to need guarding all the time. His eyes pulse in time with the Walkers, kalidoscope whirlwinds growing and shrinking with her voice. Nyra feels powerful, which is a little bit alien and a whole lot of wierd, but eventually she decides she likes the high-up feeling in her chest.

More Queenlike, she thinks.

At some point her hand finds its way into his. It's a bit slimy and squishes when you put too much pressure on it. She squeezes tighter.

...

Her head is propped up against the cold, hard, feathery soft wall, and her eyes are threatening to close, which she did _not_ give them permission to do, when his open wide. The Walkers stir and swirl in something Nyra could've mistaken for excitement. The man turns to her and smiles a smile that is too old and wise and wonderful for his dying face.

His eyes have stopped changing. Now they are the steady, azure blue of the sky that watches over wanderers forging thier way through the harshest desert, unable to help but rooting for them all the same.

On the edge of sleep, Nyra thinks she's seen that blue before.

It's only once she wakes up she realises he stopped talking.

...

 _She doesn't open her eyes. She simply can't see one instant, and she can the next. The orbs of light hang suspended in the blackness, stars guiding her through an unfamiliar sea._

 _But Nyra has seen all this before, so she decides to go exploring. She focuses on a point on the horizon, and it rushes forward eagerly to meet her. Without her actually moving, Nyra has the impression of hundreds of miles of hills and valleys and marshes rushing beneath her toes, then a sharp incline, and she's skimming up a mountain face like a skipping stone. The air grows thin and glassy. Gradually, the mountain slows to a stop._

 _Ahead a sphere of purest gold hovers, just brushing the mountain's peak. If the others are candle flames then this, this is the heart of the Sun itself. It sets a rapturous wonder shivering through her body like plucking a guitar string, and Nyra fears to take another step._

 _Someone without body or mind walks up from behind and rests a reassuring hand on the place where Nyra's shoulder would be. Blue tinges her sightline, and she feels the someone nudge her forward, a chick taking her first steps before learning to fly. She sees the other points of light pulled forward, hundreds of miles in a single step, and they fall into orbit together around the brilliant star, linked by thin capillaries of blue light. Through them they flow through and with her._

 _They whirl together. Images of places she has never seen paint themselves in her head._

 _She crouches in the soot-stained bowels of a great machine, rocking with the lurch of giant footsteps, hands dancing and weaving with metal, supple as silk in her hands, trying to block out the wrenching gurgle of the engines -_

 _No, now she stands on the deck of an airship, gliding through the sky as a swan glides through water, suspended on the spirit trails of a thousand dancers. She reaches out over the railing, to touch with a hand that is not her own, and the current foams into a swarm of kaliadescope butterflies -_

 _She sits hunched over on a hill, deep in the marshes, high above the fug of noise and smoke that smothers the tribe, forcing measured breaths while she watches another hunting party strike out into the wilderness, envy curdling in her gut -_

 _And they whirl together, seperate, together and one, faster and faster and-_

 _..._

When she does wake, there's a happy moment when the day before is nothing but a nightmare.

Then the chill of the concrete slaps her cheek, and the crick her neck is an iron nail. She surfaces, blinking in the sun of another morning. Wind chimes play thier familiar tunes. The only evidence of the moss man are slimy green footprints, trailing out of the building and up the street.

Because _of course_ the universe wants more from her.

She leans her head back against the wall, and indulges in a long winded sigh. Her tailbone is starting to complain, so she uses the wall to lever herself up, and totters over to the kitchen table like the hundred year-old miser she has become. She sort of melds into the chair, staring up at the roof and imagining she can see her balloon through the concrete.

She is a deer caught in headlights; she can see the danger coming but she doesn't know (how could she know?) what to do? She could ascend back to her palace in the clouds. Run and leave these pointless tragedies to the ground-dwellers. She has at least a dozen adventures to go on. Nucktuck might protect her.

The footprints beckon her out of sight. Nyra already knows where they lead, the same way a hangman knows when they come to take him to the noose.

Everyone makes it to the crater in the end.

Her cold, dead family sit around her, waiting. If they could speak now, what would they say?

She thinks back to the Walkers. All their unresolved stories.

Her hand reaches out of it's own accord, fingers hovering over Kyro's beak, and Nyra is powerless to do anything but scrunch up her eyes as they descend to the detenation button of a bomb. It's suprisingly smooth, like ebony wood. She strokes it feathery-soft, as he had stroked her hair in life, when she was tired enough to drop but too stubborn to say so. He would just smile and pretend not to notice when her head leaned against his shoulder.

Nyra forces herself to look at them both, through the masks they are forced to wear, really _look_ for the first time. She sees no monsters. Just broken men. Boys. Out of nowhere, tears threaten to spill over again. The feathers suit Kyro, sort of. They burn like amythest fire. Her mouth opens and words bubble up, things she wants to say and things she needs to, even if they hurt too much.

But the sun is rising and the clock is ticking, and Nyra realises with a sudden jolt she has a subject to find. So she jumps up, letting the words congeal in the back of her throat and choke her into silence.

Nucktuck cannot protect her from harsh reality. She will not shawl herself in fantasies when the real world has so much bite. But Queens are brave, and fierce enough to bite back. Nyra can help the runaway stranger. She will be his Nucktuck, as best she can in a world where heroes are make-believe memories. She can be his champion.

Her backpack is still half full, so packing takes only a moment. Her fingers play over her remaining supplies like a pianist over ivory keys. It's taken her years to amass such a comprehensive group of tools. Her entire life's work is sitting here, at this table. She doesn't suppose she'll be seeing it again.

Nyra picks up the mask and breather from the floor where she'd dropped them. For traddition's sake, if nothing else. She secures it into place and slips out of the building, following the slimy green breadcrumb trail. The dead watch her go in unreadable silence, as is thier way.

It occurs to Nyra that one day there will be another Queen of Republic City, or maybe a King, to unknowingly inherit her ghosts and unspoken appologies. Maybe a week from now, maybe a hundred years, she doubts it would make a difference, but she still hopes they'll be up to the task. Gods know she wasn't.

She walks into the verdant maw of a monster. Behind her, she knows her balloon watches, hovering over the place where home used to be. She doesn't look back.

The footprints lead her through tangles of vines and shards of concrete embedded in the road like splinters, past tree trunks that watch her, as one watches the funeral procession of a stranger. Nyra is careful to tiptoe around their roots, a mouse darting between the toes of dormant giants.

The footprints are a fickle guide, weaving and double tracking and vanishing from beneath her feet. It becomes harder to see as the canopy gets thicker, weaving a cage to stop the sunlight touching her. She is squinting now, bent double with her nose almost down to the ground.

The air is stagnant and soupy, wafting to and fro, the slumbering breath of something ancient and mildewed inside. Nyra's mask has misted up, and her own breathing echoes like a death rattle.

The footprints disappear. Nyra freezes, foot suspended mid-step. She casts a frantic glance backwards, but it's like they were never there. They have marooned her in this hellish twilight.

The trees crowd in from all around, twitching like the trigger hairs of a venus flytrap. The silence trembles around the edges, wanting to be broken. Nyra feels a thousand mouths screaming at her, struggling against the chains of thier silence.

Spirits. The place is dripping with them, though they remain unseen.

The air thunders through her lungs, but Nyra still can't breathe. The mask - Desperate fingernails scrabble with the strap welding it to her face, but then the trees behind shiver in a wind only they can feel, and they _whisper_ , the discordant chior of a thousand voices.

A warning. A threat. Nyra lets her hands slip back to her sides.

There's a building up ahead, with one side ripped out and its guts spilling all over the sidewalk, but it looks structurally sound. She pads over and vaults to an open third storey window, letting the air carry her forward. The stone is rough, but she's built up enough callouses not to care. She needs to get her barings, if nothing else.

If it's twilight outside, then in here, under the remenants of a shattered roof, the world is suspended in the midnight hour. Nyra perches on the windowsill and gives her eyes a moment to adjust, picking out drifts of splinters and a maze of broken water pipes puncturing the far wall like shards of broken bone. There's a balcony across the room that will have a perfect view.

Nyra places a tentative toe on what's left of the floor. The boards literally sag under her weight. It would be suicide to even -

She throws herself forward with a gust of wind. For a second she flails in midair, gwaky like a newborn giraffe, then lands on the other side in a cloud of wood shavings. The building groans like a sinking ship. Nyra lies still, trying not to breathe in the decay, letting the silence settle back to sleep.

The forest seems to roll over and settle: She picks herself up, quite pleased. Through the opening onto the balcony, she thinks she can spy a path -

She takes a step forward and her legs are torn from under her by an explosion of rotten wood. The balcony tips and spills her forward, then there is a rush of splinters and noise and breaking as it is torn away into the false twilight, dragging her with it. The ground flips up and sideways. Nyra closes her eyes as it rushes up to meet her -

Wood shatters like glass and Nyra is launched clear; she throws her arms out, and the element hears her prayer because soft air cushions her fall. She skids to a stop along the pavement.

Her head is spinning. There's an iron tang in her mouth.

For a minute the forest is silent, waiting for her finish, as you wait for someone to end a eulogy at a funeral. Then a nightmare of twisted trunks and clotted earth rears its montorous head, and the trees on every side hiss and writhe, as if in ecstasy of being free once more.

Nyra is up and running on broken limbs, staggering blind and deaf for the thousand tiny vipers wriggling into her ears.

 _"Turn around turn around turn around turn around turn around turn-"_

Shadows tilt towards her as she sprints past, sticking to her, trying to drag her back.

 _"turnaroundturnaroundturnaroundturnturnturnturn-"_

The voices twist and bind into something else. Something warmer, deeper and loved, oh so _loved_...

"Turn around. Come on now, turn around, you can do it. I know you can. We haven't got all day girl, we're burning daylight..." The voice chuckles and Nyra finally lets herself scream. She stumbles along, blind for the misting of her mask. Shapeless monsters loom from the fog and she lunges away, plunging deeper, ever deeper -

"TURN TURN TURN TURN TURN-"

The voices scream, and over the top of them Papi scolds her.

"We're doing this for your own good girl. When have I ever let you down?"

That's not fair, because Nyra knows the answer, and one foot turns to answer while the other runs on. She trips and tumbles, but the now even the ground has abandoned her and she falls into empty space with arms outstretched -

...

 _She is back orbiting the newborn sun that sits cross-legged, facing the far horizon, serenely indifferent._

 _The lights whirl together. Too fast, sick. Nyra can make out niether sky nor ground as they slingshot into oblivion. The light in front balks like a spooked squirel-deer, (its the indecisive one that's only halfway through the threshold) straining at the web of blue light keeping them all together, now a suffocating net._

 _Nyra risks a glance behind and sees red. A crimson misma hangs over the third light like a thunderhead (the dull one that has lost its glimmer). It reaches out from behind and jabs jabs jabs at the gossomer threads holding the orb back from oblivion, rose thorns dipped in blood. Blue flakes like old paint. One by one, the threads begin the snap like spun glass._

 _Nyra glances to the side, and sees the final light keeping pace beside her, a bounding wolf, juggling its different dances. It's close. It veers closer and just brushes her; Nyra gasps and feels an electric bolt of colour lance through her. She sees the city, her kingdom, the looming corpses of the buildings viewed through eyes that had never seen their like before._

 _Closer-_

 _..._

Time and place trickle back to her like sand through an hourglass. Nyra groans, and peels her face off of the floor. She risks a glance up, and sees nothing but a blurry splash of gold: For a moment she's still stuck in the dream, and that's scary because she doesn't want to crash through eternity forever.

She squeezes her eyes shut and open again. Things come into clearer focus. She lies at the bottom of the crater, the sting of a dozen scrapes proof of a nasty fall down its side. The trees have halted thier advance, and ring the clearing like acolytes waiting for their consummation.

The voices have receeded to the background. The moss man is slumped over by the crater's centre, unconcious, hand reaching out. But for a second Nyra forgets about him. Because the thing he's reaching for...

Twin threads of green and gold coil around the clearing like unspooled wire, flexing slightly, the way a hangman's feet insist on twitching even after he's dead. Nyra struggles to her feet again, casting her broken mask aside, and walks forward, ducking under the threads to reach the centre, where a burst artery of molten gold sprays a starburst of light across the crater. Its light reaches up, for a sky it can no longer reach, and falls back on itself like a fountain trying to be a waterfall.

Nyra reaches out to touch. Dully, she wonders if this is what got the others.

A hand shoots out and grabs her foot. She squeaks and twists, and stares into blue eyes.

Something speaks through the man, from aeons and lightyears away and right beneath her feet.

 _"We're running out of time."_

"For what?" Is that her voice? Why is she so calm? This is a time for the exact opposite of calm!

 _"Time... Running out of... "_ the man shudders on the floor, and his grip tightens painfully on her ankle. _"Find the others. Find... Find the Few to find the One."_

"What?" she crouches down.

 _"Find the Few. They are lost... alone... won't come willingly. You have to make them see... Thats who you are."_

Nyra opens her mouth, a million different questions crowding to be answered, but the man shudders again. This time, he lets go of her ankle.

The trees rustle in unholy symphony. Papi chuckles.

Suddenly, Nyra is aware someone's watching her. She straightens, removing her foot as delicately as possible, and turns, knowing what she'll see. Papi, wreathed in blue, skin crispy marshmallow goo and his eyes running down his face as jelly, the sockets blown out from his own cannibal flames, that had eaten him from the inside out.

A teenage girl is pointing a spear at her face. She has a red mohecan, a lick of flame across her scalp, and warm, earthy eyes that wear menacing very well. Dozens of tribal beads hang around her neck. Behind her, a machine prowls, hackles up, its eyes glowing that eternal brilliant blue.

Nyra tries for a smile.

"Um, hi?"

"Who are you, girl?"

Nyra composes herself.

"The correct form of adress is Your Majesty."

...

 **A/N: First of all, as this is the greatest passion project I have ever undertaken and is apparently worth more to me than exams and a good job, please please please please** _ **please**_ **leave a review. I don't mind about favourites and such (but if you feel the need then by all means...) but I just really want to know what you guys thought of this, positive or negative. Indifferent, even. Writing style? World? Character?**

 **I promise I'm not needy.**

 **(Nose grows ten feet).**

 **Stay tuned for chapter two,** _ **If You Go Into The Woods Today**_ **. It'll probably take a while.**

 **A/N/N: So. Sup, fuckers? I hope you've made it this far, and if you have, congratulations and I love you too much for words. This idea has been pinging around in my head for** _ **years**_ **, and I've only just felt confident enough to put it down on (proverbial) paper thanks to a really supportive friend.**

 **So, yeah, this is how I see a Korra post-appocolypse working out, and trust me, we've barely scratched the surface. I have multiple protagonists from very,** _ **very**_ **different walks of life lined up, and the idea is to gradually tease out what actually happened to screw the world up so bad. We will be exploring all over the place, not just Republic City. Walkers and Machines will be properly explained (and in the words of Shiro Shinobi, it's a doozy!)**

 **Eventually I will be linking back to the characters we know immediately post-finale, so expect lots of politics, police proceduralisms (is that a thing?), crime, airbender-iness (I'm making these up as I go along) and a modest sprinkling of romance (Yes, Korrasami shippers, I did see you there).**

 **Got a helluva villain(s) lined up, even if I do say so myself, and I really want to delve into the supporting characters (Kai is my spirit animal, Jinora is secretly the best character ever created, Lin is unreal and Opal deserves more than she got. Also, Kuvira's underdevelopment is a crime it would be criminal not to exploit).**

 **But I'm getting ahead of myself, because as of right now - They're all dead! MWAHAHA!**


End file.
